10 Steps To Transformation

7. Turn to your community as partners in tackling big issues

Ruth Puttick - 02.11.2010

Meaningful community participation can be a powerful way to respond to social challenges and to prompt redesign of public services. With appropriate support, communities can and want to get involved.

Assuming community ability to respond to local issues is the bedrock of Government’s Big Society agenda, and its forthcoming ‘Localism’ bill is expected to enable communities to run local public services. But as public spending is reduced, there are legitimate questions about how and at what point communities should be engaged in decision making and in service design and delivery. Is this just about scaling back state provision? What support do communities need to get involved? Purposefully engaging communities is not easy.

In our own experience, meaningful community participation can be a powerful way to respond to social challenges and to prompt redesign of public services. But securing engagement beyond the ‘usual suspects’ requires structured support and careful design. People need to feel equipped for participation – with the right information and means to take part. And maintaining engagement means a commitment to transparency and consistent communication, on both sides. With appropriate support, communities can and want to get involved.

Firstly, in understanding the problem, involving the community can be a powerful way of redefining the challenges faced. Drawing upon people’s knowledge of the issues faced locally can garner new perspectives on the problem and ensure that resources are spent effectively. Redbridge Council, for instance, is applying Participatory Budgeting to involve local people in future spending decisions. By catalysing community involvement and drawing upon the knowledge and resources this offers, the council is able to generate better, different, and cheaper ways of meeting local needs.

And secondly, in delivering the solution. We have already argued for public services to utilise the wealth of ideas in the community, but we can go beyond this and enable communities to develop new approaches to tackle big issues. When we were running the Big Green Challenge it was clear that communities understood local need, could tap into networks and relationships, and had the capacity to respond. Rather than big upfront investment, the communities involved created innovative new solutions as long as they were given the right kind of support. A little investment unleashed an enormous amount of additional resource. 

Cheap and easy to use social media and collaborative technologies are making it increasingly easy for communities to mobilise around a common cause anywhere in the world– and for government and local authorities to join the conversation. Barnet Council, for instance, uses Google Alerts to be notified of online conversations amongst residents, enabling a collaborative relationship to be created. And Kirklees Council is building an online community resource to enable residents to discuss solutions to problems in the areas.

Community action and engagement has become more than consultation and is increasingly advocated as a means for delivering services. Even before the cuts it was recognised that there are issues government can’t respond to on their own. Issues ranging from complex, global challenges such as climate change, to local and personal issues such as poor public health or anti-social behaviour can be difficult to determine centrally. 

Just as individual users can be more involved in services, so communities can offer a wealth of ideas and resources to support the transformation of public services. The challenge is using this in the right way – using people’s existing networks and relationships to support better services but not taking advantage of them. Processes like participatory budgeting – an approach which NESTA has based a new programme on – might offer a route for doing so.

The community decides. This is the Regional Participatory Budget Assembly in Partenon, Porto Alegre, Brazil. Local community members are voting on the priorities for 2010 and on the representatives for 2009-2010. Later those representatives and the delegates vote on the budget during the meetings that take place after the end of the cycle of Assemblies, generally in September or October. Image courtesy of Ivo Goncalves.